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Eddie Long crowned a King with help of the Torah

In case you’re short on *facepalm* moments today, check out this video of an odd coronation of scandal plagued pastor Eddie Long as a Hebrew king by a fellow who appears to follow some variant of Messianic Judaism and who, because he has dual citizenship with Israel, speaks on behalf of the “Jewish people”.

In the sea of inanity that is this video, the stretch I found particularly interesting was the segment on the number 22:

“There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet…22 chromosomes in the human body (the 23rd was added by man)..22 amino acids…Jewish doctors say if you look at cells through a microscope, they look like Hebrew script.”

OK……

An associate professor of Hebrew critiques the scriptural claims here. I’ll leave the rest to those with a working knowledge of biology and biochemistry.

Isn’t the deeply weird artificial syncretism with twisted and fabricated (heretical, even) content fun? More bizarre than the Japanese New Religions were, this was thrown together in a hurry to prop up someone who violates his own dogma. None of that same-old “I sinned grievously but now I’ve repented/been reborn and now I’m better than ever”, oh no.

And I thought the “England is Zion” and “GW Bush was sent by God” stuff was wacky.

To add to the excellent refutation of this monstrosity (oddly in the usually awful Huffington Post), that life and death stuff towards the end of the ceremony seems to be stolen from the Grimms’ Golem fairy tale, which I think sets the level of the Kabbalsitic scholarship on display.